Beautiful Butterfly eggs “Nymphalis Antiopa"

This morning we found about half of the egg cluster had already hatched. The newborn larvae have that typical nymphalid look with the dark colored heads and smooth, long and tube-like, yellow colored body. Surprisingly, they didn't seem quite as well organized as some other gregarious species we have reared despite the fact that there are so many of them together. The larvae more or less just swarmed around the willow leaf in clumps but not lining up together or forming any kind of organized group.

The eggs continued to hatch consistently over the day. At some point, we put in a fresh cutting of willow (Salix). It seemed that the there were simply too many larvae to feed together in one spot so they broke into smaller groups. Many of the older larvae crawled onto the new cutting, swarming the stem near the tip of the cutting where the new growth was. Most of them began feeding shortly, very messily.
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29 September 2022
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